The Test Drive: Chhandomay on Sun Product Reviews

InformationWeek's
Serdar Yegulalp posted a review
of five open-source office suites,
including OpenOffice.org 3.0
and StarOffice 9. Serdar
shared positive
feedback on both OpenOffice.org 3.0 and StarOffice 9, finding that
overall, "it's hard to go wrong with OpenOffice.org as a default
choice. Aside from enjoying the support of both Sun and IBM (albeit in
different ways), it's expanded its cross-compatibility with Microsoft
Office, making it that much easier for people to migrate and continue
existing work."

For OpenOffice.org 3.0, Serdar said that it "is an evolutionary, rather
than revolutionary, step forward from OpenOffice.org 2.0," finding that
the major changes were a series of small new updates. These updates
included native Mac support, feature additions to Calc and Impress, and
updates to the PDF exporter. Serdar complimented OpenOffice.org 3.0 for
being "completely document-compatible, and it's both slightly faster
and every bit as stable as the original."

In the review of StarOffice 9,
Serdar noted that the product
features
were very similar to OpenOffice.org 3.0, but this commercial version of
the software also brought support, bundling, and deployment. In
addition to the benefits of the Thunderbird and Lightening extensions,
Serdar said that Sun has made major contributions with the "galaxy of
add-ons
they've written for the system." Some of these add-ons, such as
the PDF editing and weblog publishing tools worked well for basic
editing, but other options provided more advanced editing. However,
Serdar "especially liked the MediaWiki
extension... which lets you edit
and publish directly to or from sites that use the MediaWiki software
(Wikipedia, for instance) without needing to know the MediaWiki markup
language."